I would like to explore a research question that explores Airbnb in Boston. To be more specific, I am wondering what factors affect the price of Airbnb. Do numbers of bedrooms, types of room, and scores of satisfaction affect the price? Moreover, does a neighborhood with high crime rate cause lower prices on Airbnb? I will also combine data, such as crime incident reports to analyze whether these factors influence the price of Airbnb.

A. Distribution of price in Boston area.

We can see from the first plot that the neighborhood Jamaica Plain has the highest price that is around 600 dollars. Then, South Boston has the second high prices. Most of Airbnb has the price range from 50 to 300 dollars per night. We can see the distribution of each neighborhood in the second plot. Moreover, we can select the neighborhood to see the distribution. Take Fenway as an example, most of Airbnb has the price from 100 to 200 dollars per night.

We can see from the previous graph that the median of rooms with different numbers of bedrooms differs a lot. This means numbers of bedrooms affect the price of Airbnb in the Boston area. The price on airbnb increases when the number of bedrooms increases.

The entire room/apt has the highest price. The prices between private rooms and shared rooms change a little by observing the previous graph. Moreover, the most popular type of room in the Boston area is the entire home/apt.

The score of satisfaction has little affect on the price. We can see that median of different scores of satisfaction are almost the same.

A. Text analysis on description on Airbnb

I explore the description of housings on Airbnb and do the text analysis about the description. The most frequent word is apartment. Then, the word kitchen is the second. I can check the number of each word by clicking the word. Moreover, we can see private, restaurants, neighborhood from the description on Airbnb.

I also do the text analysis on the space of housings on Airbnb. The result is shown before. The most people care about words like large, new, and comfortable.

Let us see the result of text analysis on transportation on Airbnb. Words like walk, station, and line appear frequently. People are more interested in housings that are closed to public transportations.

A. Crime in Boston area

Here is crime incidents map in Boston in 2017. The black dot is the place where the incident took place. We can see that there were many incidents in Downtown, Roxbury, and Dorchester areas. I will combine this map with price distribution to explore the question that does a neighborhood with high crime rate cause lower prices on Airbnb?

Here is an interactive map that we can visually explore the relationship between price and number of crimes in the Boston area. I found that the high occurrence of crimes affects the price on Airbnb in some neighborhoods. For example, neighborhoods that like Dorchester and Mattapan have lower prices. However, downtown has a more complicated situation that prices were distributed unevenly in this area. We need more information to find out what factors cause this situation.

From the previous analysis, we can see that the number of bedrooms and the type of rooms affect the price on Airbnb. The score of satisfaction actually has little influence on price. Moreover, more crimes indeed affect prices in some neighborhoods. Nevertheless, other neighborhoods have different situations. The reasons that cause this problem perhaps are building quality, transportation, and so on. I will import more data to explore this project in the future.

http://tomslee.net/airbnb-data-collection-get-the-data

https://data.boston.gov/